short story -on my grandmother's grave grape hyacinths grow

In books you read of people who keep their grandmothers in an urn on the mantelpiece. Their ashes that is. People do not seem to keep their grandfathers in the same way. Perhaps grandfathers are not a part of the domestic scene in the same way that women are.

My grandmother was not kept in an urn, reduced to ashes. She is buried in the same grave as my grandfather in the cemetery at Wynyard. My aunt, the artist, and the eldest in the family, organised a garden grave in amongst the granite that was popular after the Second World War. Each spring, grape hyacinths, violets and freesias bloom amongst the weeds. My mother complained each year of having to weed the grave. It was a playground designed for children and long before I could understand the concept of death I was drawn to the little white wooden crosses at the bottom of the cemetery. They were down a dip and not seen readily from the main paths. My mother said they were pauper graves. Some of them had white picket fences around them and they looked like children's cots. I grieved for these babies and children who were not alive.

Felicity asked me how I felt when Lesley and I collected my baby grandson Hamish's ashes.

We had waited days in a town where we no longer belonged, staying with friends and relatives, forging a relationship between two families who had little in common but the dreams of a small baby. The time was strangely long. Pathologists were not available to release the body for some days and the thought of him lying on a cold hard slab at the hospital was never far from our thoughts.

The young adults wiped themselves out with dope and serapax, drove my car far too fast and avoided talking to the older generation. The undertakers wanted to insist on decoration for the small white coffin but Lesley was adamant, she only wanted red carnations and gypsophila from my sister's garden. She wanted no decoration, no religion and no ritual. I wrote the ceremony over the next few days and it lasted less than five minutes.

Days went by and the minutes seemed like days, stretching through sixty long seconds. Sometimes I sat on the beach with Felicity, on smooth black basalt rocks. It was the middle of summer and there must have been people everywhere but my memory is like a Matisse painting, of two flat figures, pasted forever on the flat landscape.

Six days after he died there was a pathologist available. We did not know what he would find but we were all nervous. What if Hamish had been ill and we had failed to notice. How could we have missed it. He was a big healthy two month old child with a strong personality. A big handsome baby who turned people's heads from the time he was born.

The Coroner phoned me late in the evening of the sixth day to say there was no reason for his death and that his death certificate would indicate sudden infant death syndrome. The funeral for immediate family went ahead the next morning five days after his death. I wore the dress I had worn the week before to my eldest daughter's wedding. Lesley wore my niece's hat she had worn for her wedding. There was something of my mother in Lesley at that time. Everything had to be quite correct, including the small veil that hid her eyes.

After the funeral we had lunch at my niece's, and my sister made endless cups of coffee and tea. Hamish's father and his family stood across the large room gazing outwards through the windows across the water, like statues from Easter Island, not seeing and still.

Some years ago Baxter's daughter had a baby when she was fourteen. Baxter had herself been pregnant with her daughter at fifteen. She had moved to Tasmania in the early seventies with the child and bought a piece of land behind Sheffield on a hippy commune. After she and the child had built a shanty and survived on dreams for a few years, she found that she missed Sydney and her career. The daughter was left for months at a time with neighbours, church people, old folks and anyone who was interested. Baxter felt that it would help the girl to grow up with a broad understanding of life.

She was a beautiful child, unkempt, clothed in hand me downs and what ever came her way. When she was ready for secondary education Baxter organised for her to reside in a boarding home for old men, tucked away in a side road in the country. A private sort of affair that probably had no licence. Baxter's daughter was bright, articulate, interested in life but strangely unaware. Children at school complained that she smelt and she was reported to the authorities. But she went missing completely.

She had found a horse in the paddock next door and taught herself to ride bare back. The son of the family who owned the horse was twenty-two and Baxter's daughter fourteen when she fell in love and pregnant within the month. His family was Jewish, practicing Jews. I keep shaking my head but up the back of Sheffield in the seventies there was a strange mixture of folk. T hey took Baxter's daughter into their home and the child too when he was born.

After two years when Baxter's daughter was sixteen she took her child and asked for help. The Government housed her in a unit amongst a set of twelve units, which were all occupied by single older women. It was right on a major arterial road into the town and had no fence or barrier between the front door and the road. The Jewish family got as far as the Family Court in an attempt to gain custody of the child but found they had failed to register his birth. Baxter's daughter was fined $60.

Jessie was blonde, blue eyed and bright. In fact he was a child who sparkled. His mother adored him and cuddled him continuously. She said she had never been cuddled as a child. She was hoping Baxter would come down to the shanty for Christmas but she had not heard from her for years. She gathered around her the lost and forlorn. I remember a small weedy lad of fourteen who had never known his mother being cuddled and comforted by her. She was generous with what she had, both materially and emotionally. And all the kids that gathered around her loved Jessie.

When he was killed by a car after running on to the road one evening, the police wanted to charge Baxter's daughter with negligence. They knew it would not stick but they thought it would teach her a lesson. Baxter's daughter and the kids around managed the funeral as best they could. They bought new clothes for him and asked me to dress him for his funeral.

Jessie had been dead for a week and he was badly injured in the accident. The undertakers had requested a closed coffin but Baxter had arrived from Sydney and wanted to see the grandson she had never known. Baxter was the first person I met who had one name only. She said she saw it on a bill board one night and it seemed anonymous enough, even for her.

When we had finished dressing Jessie and wrapped him in a blanket Baxter nursed her daughter who in turn nursed her son Jessie. They were crying and Baxter's daughter said to me, look Nessa. Mummy is cuddling me and I am cuddling Jessie. We are all cuddling each other.

At the grave side the people from the American church sang there is a place for little children beyond the bright blue sky. The grey sky drove rain needles into our eyes. The older women from the other units shivered apart in their cardigans and tut tutted to each other. All the kids and Baxter were crying. With all their hearts they wanted to believe there was a place – a somewhere beyond the bright blue sky. They were children themselves.

It was a bleak scene from Wuthering Hights on a bleak hillside with no head stones, no crosses, no memorials - only small dull plaques in the grass.

Like everything else Baxter's daughter moved on. She was already pregnant again, with a daughter, and Baxter took her home to Sydney.

,

After the funeral for Hamish the families went home, and Lesley and I waited another two days for his ashes. On the evening that he was cremated Lesley and I went for a long walk along the river. As the tide turned, a soft breeze talked itself through the wattle trees along the banks and blew softly in our faces. This was about the time Hamish's spirit had been released. Later when I felt the soft easterly breeze tossing my paper lanterns in the hall I said to myself, Hi Hamish.

On Saturday morning we drove to the funeral parlour in Lesley's car, a small beat up Gemini, to collect Hamish's ashes. I can remember feeling relief, an unexpected feeling. Relief that we had Hamish back and knew where he was, with us. After all those days of having been without him.

The car was packed full with cribs and prams and baby gear and Lesley's friend and Lesley’s friend’s baby in the back. Lesley sat in the front with the small plastic box of Hamish on her knee and I said be careful. I drove with the seat jammed forward and my knees jammed against the dashboard for four long hours. I was worried about an accident and I have no recall of any detail of that long trip home.

We took the plastic box apart and Hamish went into a Chinese pot, like the grandmothers in the novels. For a while he sat beside my bed and then he travelled with Lesley on her trips away. For a long time he sat on the wooden cupboard in the dining room and during the Saturday morning housework I would sometimes lift the little china lid and say Hi Hamish.

Before Lesley left for England we walked to the cliffs and tossed his ashes into a wild cove where the sea drives in fiercely from the south. Lesley kept some ashes to scatter in England but returned -with them intact and her dreams in tatters. We returned to the same spot and scattered the rest into the same wild sea, green and deep with foam cascading down the cliffs as each wave withdrew. I said to Lesley, look. As each wave breaks into the cove there is a small but perfect rainbow. Where, she said disbelieving. Then we watched as the pure winter sunshine worked its magic.

I sometimes miss having his ashes around. I go down to the cliffs and watch the ocean and look at the wildflowers and marvel a little at how inevitable everything is. One day I took my eldest grandson down there and we saw an albatross and a sea hawk over the ocean as we sat on the edge of a cliff eating fish and chips. There were brilliant flashes of kingfishers in the banksias. A day of magic.

My grandson said, gee Nan this would be a great track for my motorbike. Dad said if I could find a track I could bring it down and he and I could go together. I’ll bring it down next time and we can do wheelies all up this track. And I said yes.

Felicity will have collected Jack, her father's ashes by now. Western society is not tolerant of ritual outside the norm. Where do you put your Dad when you pick him up in a beautifully hand made wooden box? Do you put the seatbelt on? Could you put it in the boot? Or on the back seat?

I can remember travelling with Father Casey once when Marnie was a baby to see an old woman near Sheffield, to give her holy communion. Father Casey was Irish, loved golf and women and drink, and was a notoriously bad driver. As we went round a bend things slid off the back seat and he said, oh sorry Lord. Mary can you pick our Lord up and put Him back on the seat? And he was perfectly serious.

Felicity says she will scatter Jack's ashes in the garden at Elliott and across the winning tine of the Burnie Gift, as Jack was a famous trainer of runners. She will have to do this at night as the scattering of ashes in a public place is an offence.

It is the habit for humans to return. To my grandmother's grave to find grape hyacinths still flowering half a century later. To the wild edge of the Somerset cemetery where heaths and daisies hide the space where my father lies. To the green green grass where a small plaque says my mother lies deep and deeply buried. To the cliffs.

I have this vision of Felicity and me, making the trip, sitting alone in the great grandstand at West Park in our old age, in our warm woollen overcoats. We will make a toast to the sometime and the somewhere, and cheer Jack over the finishing line.

short story - whatever happened to Beatrix Maree

In a small white cottage in Launceston, Tasmania, a woman called Beatrix Maree Henry conducted a nursing home for birthing mothers. Business was slow during the early 1940s. The War had taken most of the available sperm bank overseas to fight on the beaches.

A small white woman in her late forties presented at the nursing home to produce an unwanted fourth child. Reality was elusive and birth pain unacceptable. The new wonder drug "Twilight Zone" gave the reluctant mother several dreamy days of non-reality in which the pain separated itself from her body. The Macquarie Dictionary advises that ‘twilight sleep’ is a state of semi-consciousness produced by hypodermic injection of scopolamine and morphine in order to effect painless child birth. Police records indicate that the small woman roamed the nearby streets in her French lawn nightdress for three days without even feeling the cold of a Tasmanian mid winter.

Beatrix Maree Henry was particularly kind to the small middle aged woman during this time. On a Thursday the woman gave birth to a surprisingly large and healthy female child. The child was named Beatrix Maree after the woman who brought her into the world. The small woman and her elderly husband had not discussed names.

The child was remarkably alert and vigorous given the drugged state of the mother prior to her birth. A woman was engaged to care for the child and to see to her daily needs.

Beatrix's early memories focus on nightmares that thrashed the high ceiling of her huge white bedroom. The War was raging and her father listened to the short wave radio reports late into the night while the small child clung to his legs. At the end of the street where the child lived, war posters dominated the billboard. Two children in rags clutching each other - one child on crutches with a leg missing. The Red Cross needs your help. The Red Cross needs your help. The Red Cross frightened Beatrix Maree.

Young men left the local railway station in their new khaki uniforms. Proud to be Australian. Brave and blonde. They leant out of the train carriages to wave to mothers, wives and sweethearts who wept in the cold half-light. The town sang "wish me luck as you wave me good-bye" without realising that words need meanings.

The child in bed would be filled with fear. Fear of the War. Fear of the Germans. Fear of the Japs. Fear of the guns. Fear of the men. A fear that was black and inside her. When the fear became too great, she would race across the miles of polished tiles, through the arch of the entrance hall to the warm and comfortable bed of her parents. The voice lay lost inside her. The parents remained asleep. She struggled back to the small white cold bed to wait for the first light of morning.

Sometimes the child was sent to the aunts. The aunt who loved children and the aunt who was an artist. Spinster women in their sixties. Remarkable women who rescued the child from her nightmares and took her into their warm and cosy bed when the nights grew cold. Remarkable women who taught the child to read and write. To play the piano. To draw and colour. To know the names of flowers and birds. To swim in the salty river.

When the child was four the War ended. The War to end all wars. All the bells in the town rang. The bells in the Catholic churches competed with the bells in the Church of England near the city square. People lined the streets and cheered. The aldermen gave the children small silk British flags and brown paper bags of hard brown lollies. A bonfire was built near the show ground and the flames rose gloriously with sky rockets into the starry sky.

The child's name was in the local paper twice that summer. She had insisted on swimming in the local swimming lessons. Adults had given way at her fierce insistence. On the day of testing she was left till last. Furious she fronted the beginning tape and began to dog paddle. Twenty-five yards later she demanded recognition. On the day the certificates were handed out the child received hers last. The pest of a child. A man from the local paper took her photograph and reported the story - that the child was a remarkable.

Her mother took some notice and sent to the local paper a poem the child had written. A poem about 'the baby Jesus. The child won the prize which was signed by an important woman. A book of small moral verses with a red cord through the binder. A remarkable poem the woman said.

This was the summer the child started school. Too early, her father's friends and the aunts said. On the first day the child took her notebook and pencils and wrote a story for her aunts. The nun in charge found that she was writing words and took a ruler and smacked the small fingers. Whack! Whack!

The child's father had to be summoned from his work at the City Hall. The child bawled loudly and long. Tears and snot running down the father's suit. The father sent for the aunts. This child is a most remarkable child the aunts told the teacher and the father. She must not be hit.

Beatrix Maree stopped writing and was afraid to sleep. She was sent to the aunts and was allowed to sleep during her days. To draw and paint and write into the night. To play the piano, to sing and tell stories in the half-light. To climb into bed between the warm soft bodies of the aging aunts. To have dreams that were no longer nightmares.

Beatrix Maree's first interest remained writing and her visual art was a sideline until she met the artist Hilary Meyer in the late 1960s. Since then painting has been her major interest. She has produced a large oeuvre of figure subjects including many vivid and unusual images of women and an interesting collection of autobiographical essays.

She sits in her, garden of red poppies and tells her grandchildren and great nephews about the aunts. The women who saved her from reality and allowed her to dream. Introduced her to the twilight zone.

short story - Mrs p and the Jellybean factory

Mrs Psozcowski's dog is dead. Mrs P lives round the road in an old beach shack. It is one of the few that survived the middle class suburban spread to the beach.

Where's your dog, I asked her.

He is dead, she says. He was seventeen. Her accent is still guttural and she hisses when she uses the letter S. She seems a lot older and walks with a staff. There is no way you could call it a walking stick.

A man in the Polish community gave him to her for company. He was the second dog she had owned and I asked her one day why she called the gentle golden labrador Brute. She said she heard women at the day centre say - oh my husband is a brute - and she thought it meant a darling. But she knows better now. He is buried quite deep in the sandy soil in her garden, wrapped in an old duvet she brought with her when she came to Australia.

Once upon a time, she tells me, one day I had a husband and two sons. My husband was a gypsy boy and his family did not approve. But we were very much in love. When the War came to Budapest my husband had to go out and be labour on the farms with other gypsy men but I think they just hid them in barn.

I had forgotten, she says, that I ever had a husband.

I like to think that he was dashing and handsome, flashy in bright clothes and that he fell head over heels in love with little Mrs P when she was young. I look at her now and I can see that she is quite old. I do not know what she would look like as a young girl.

I had to go to work in a factory, she says. I have always worked in factories except once when I was in Australia I worked for the Government department. That was just another factory.

She smiles to herself.

The factory I first worked in was in Budapest, in 1944. All the women had to work so I worked in the button factory with my friends. You think that will be nice to make buttons but I was at the end of the factory where all the buttons were still grey. I had to sort the shapes and take out the ones that were mistakes. The factory floor was damp cement and there was no money for the heating so we were always damp and cold. That is how I remember. But on Friday nights we always had a dance in the canteen and we had to dance with each other because we were very lonely and we did not have our men. This was a very happy time.

The woman who looked after my children let one get very sick and he died in the hospital. I had no money for the funeral so the priest buried him in a shroud and I had to say thank you very much. Humph, she says. Thank you very very much. After that my youngest child went to stay with my sister in the country.

After the War Budapest was not such a beautiful place any longer. Many of the gypsy men did not come home. We waited at the station on Thursday nights when the trains came in from the north with men who had been fighting and were now mending and coming home. Many people left with their money to, go to America. The man who owned the button factory sold it and I had to go and work in the factory that sorted feathers for pillows and duvets. We were not allowed to wear any jewellery in that factory and I lost my wedding ring when I put it in my pocket. It was just a little thing of twisted wire dipped in something shiny but I thought it was very valuable then.

Mrs P speaks while she breathes out. It feels as though she is blowing her story at me. She gets this effect by adding the letter H to many of the English words that start with a vowel. We sit down together to feed the ducks and I think I must bring my grandson to join in. We have a group of chestnut teals that live in the shallows on the beach with a very old and bedraggled goose. We don't know where the goose came from but it protects the ducklings from the seagulls.

At the feather factory I got very ill she tells me. All that dust. I came out in rashes and coughed all night. The doctor told me I could not work there any more. It was when I thought my husband would still come home and every thing would be all right. But the government changed at this time and things became very cruel. I am always looking like one of the old Magyars and I was very sick and upset when two friends say to me let us go Nashi, let us go, and so I went. I was so sick I did not even think of my son who was twelve by then.

We caught trains and had to hide and sometimes we walked and got lost and I got so thin I had to tie my skirt to my tummy. It was the first time I could see the sea. Oh, the blue and the white of it - and the smell. I want to have it always I said to my friends. In Italy we got on a ship with all the rest of our money to go to somewhere I had not heard of and I thought oh dear are they taking me to Austria. But I came to Australia and I went to Melbourne where I lived with my girlfriend for a long, long time.

Mrs P ends many of her sentences with a question in her voice, and her eyes. I rarely reply because this is her story.

This is so long ago, she says. I really forgot I had a husband and children once upon a time. My son who lived with my sister wrote to me once when he was a grown man but it would not be the same would it when you think you have a child and he turns out to be a man.

My girlfriend and I worked in a button factory in Port Melbourne for a long time. But always on the grey shapes and never, never do I get to the colours. But oh dear what does it matter. We had lovely dances at the pub on Saturday nights and all the girls from the factory would dress up and put bright red lipstick on.

Her eyes drift away remembering.

We were like fairies on the Christmas tree. Do you do that here she asks. What, wear red lipstick or put a fairy on the tree? She laughs out loud and I can see that she has only a few teeth left. Something I had not noticed before.

I thought I would go mad at that factory, she says, but sometimes I think it is out of order, the story I mean. I worked in a paper factory and I had to sort out the bags that were not stuck properly. Brown paper bags, she says with a sigh. But at night we went to night school to learn to write English and we would walk down after school at Port Melbourne and smell the sea and I was very, very happy with my girlfriend. There were not a lot of men for us to get a new man from. We were in our thirties but we were very happy and did not make rows or remember things that would be too hard to feel.

After I learnt English I could go to work for the Government department. A wicked sparkle comes to her eye. It is just like the factory, she says in amazement, but at the end of the day everybody goes home and we have made nothing! She looks at me and grins - don't tell me, she says, you don't make anything at the end of the day too? Oh no! And she laughs through her whole body.

When I worked for the Government department I wear very smart clothes she says. Lots and lots of lipstick and I have to keep the seams straight in my new nylon stockings. I go into the city everyday and I forget to smell the sea and then my girlfriend died and I had not noticed she was even sick. It was worse than my son dying because my girlfriend had been all of my life for many years and she went back with me to when we were girls in Budapest. She was very ill but waited for me to see she was ill before she went to the doctor. But I did not see. I was too busy being a new girl in the city. A very smart new girl.

This is the most I have ever heard Mrs P say in one breath and I have to listen carefully because she becomes quite upset when she talks about her girlfriend.

Ach, she sighs, that was a long time ago.

After my girlfriend died I could just leave a job and get another one. There were lots of jobs in Melbourne then and you could just walk out and get another one the same day. So I worked in lots of factories and they were all the same. I was very miserable. I stayed on at the little house in Port Melbourne where I had lived with my girlfriend. I would sit down on the wall at the beach and smell the salt and hear the seagulls. They make a sound like you feel when you are lonely.

I was not very well in myself you must understand. She looks at me to see if I am listening.

Then one day I got sick of the sewing, singlets I think, at the factory I was working at, all the other ladies were different. They were not very friendly and some had come to Australia from other places. I just got up and I walked out. I caught trams all day till out in a suburb I had not been to before I saw the notice on a door. Vacancies. Here I thought is where I go next. The women were very gay and happy and they hugged me a lot because I had been crying from catching those trams all day and remembering my girlfriend and all of my life had gone.

In the factory part I was in we made jellybeans. I was allowed to pack the coloured lollies into the little bags so the colours showed.

She smiles remembering and her eyes almost disappear as she laughs.

The women, ah those women, she says. They told their stories all day. The jellybeans would go past on the long belt and I had to sometimes pick out the ones that had missed their colour. A lot of the women were older than me, with lots of things that had happened to them. Sometimes good, sometimes bad. But they made a joke of it and would cry too. Sometimes both together.

She looks at me and laughs again.

And on Friday nights we went to the hotel and we danced with each other because you must understand we had no men, she tells me. No men at all. We would hug each other and laugh and dance together. A bit like a long time ago before my girlfriend was my girlfriend in Budapest. These were the happy times in all the factories I worked in, all my life.

She suddenly sighs and looks at the ducks. They have finished eating our bread and are no longer squabbling.

Then they sold my house, she says. The house my girlfriend and I had lived in for such a long time. She turns to look at me and says - that was a terrible time.

So I packed up all our things and I came to Tasmania, I thought it was far away and I got a job at the chocolate factory. They fixed it up in Melbourne because I was not well again you must understand. But when I came to Tasmania I was very lonely at first. I was going one day with one of my friends from the factory to visit her grandchild who was sick and I did not remember if I even had a grandchild. I saw this little house just here by the beach, ah with the colour of the sea and the smell, and I bought it with all the money I had been saving. I did not always spend much money on things like fancy clothes or a car. I had saved for a long time but I forgot what I was saving for. That was just a long time ago.

She shakes her head a little and laughs. She stamps her staff into the damp sand and my small dog barks at her. Then she starts talking again.

When I stopped working at the factory, the chocolate factory, I started to go to the day centre. Oh my dear, she says, there are a lot of unhappy people there. So I go a lot of days just to talk to them. I think I started going after I had not been well and I could not remember some things. But the best thing is to live by the sea and I go for walks every day and I smell, oh yes I smell the sea.

But I have to go alone now that Brute is dead.

short story - my mother likes her tea, white with no sugar.

It is the first week in July in Tasmania in 1996. A year of record rainfall. The sun is at its lowest angle especially in the morning. Before 9 am colours are intensified by the glancing rays of the sun, and shadows are etched into the dampness of the morning.

On the way to my bus stop I pass a silver birch. The trees are holding their leaves this year maybe because of the wet autumn. The leaves are silver, gold and green. The tree is covered with dew. As the early sun glances between the houses the tree sparkles like a giant Christmas bauble. And I remember the silver birch outside the sitting room window when I was a child.

In the next street two large maples are glowing, red and gold and green in the early sunshine, like huge magic lanterns. In your letter you will find a piece of a magic lantern for yourself. When we were children we made magic lanterns out of last year's Christmas cards to hang on the Christmas tree in the house with the silver birch.

We lived in this house near the local aerodrome for over ten years. The window in the sitting room facing west was a large bay window with comfortable window seats curving beneath. As children we sat at a table in this bay, cutting out and colouring in, and making magic lanterns. My mother grew wallflowers beneath the windows and the perfume in my own garden on a summer's evening tosses me back to childhood without warning.

One day while I was working in the sunshine, I pushed my brother out through the open window near the silver birch. It seemed a long way to the ground. He was older than me so I must have been quite cross with him. He had some scissors in his hand so perhaps he would not give them to me. I can't remember him crying but I can remember there being a lot of blood on the bricks below. I think there was a problem locating my father and my mother was unable to deal with emergencies. I went away and hid because I thought I had killed him with the scissors. Later they said it was a superficial wound and he had two stitches. The family since has never mentioned this incidence.

This was at during the of the Second World War. At that time they were extending the local aerodrome to the edge of our paddock. Only the creek and the paddock separated the house from the end of the new-runway. My sister says that we had to cut down a lot of beautiful gums in the paddock to make it safe for the planes to land. I don't remember this but it makes sense.

My brother and I would fie in the garden on our backs and the planes would fly over us at less than fifty metres. We recorded for some time the letters and numbers written under the wings of the planes. They were mainly Fockers and Bristol freighters. I can remember being on a plane alone when I was quite young, probably about six, and the air hostess filled my coat pockets with barley sugar. I had to chew briskly to stop my ears hurting. My brother says they were DC3s not Fockers.  Oh well... 

The house I lived in seemed tall with burnt orange tiles on the roof and tall chimneys with chimney pots, and still exists behind the hospital at Wynyard. My mother worried about a plane hitting the house as they flew so low to land and take off. There were probably two planes a day but sometimes they had air pageants. After the Second World War these were very exciting. I can remember small planes called Spitfires that darted and wove through the clouds but I don't know if that is really the name as my sister remembers a different plane.

One hot Saturday when I was about six, I went with my mother the other children no doubt, up to end of the aerodrome to watch an air pageant. It was too far to walk through the town to the Airport proper on a hot day. We watched from the point where the railway line enters the aerodrome. Yes I had forgotten that the railway line still runs straight through the aerodrome (like the train runs through the middle of the house). At that stage they had a man managing a signal box stationed at the end. When planes were coming in he put the red signal up to stop the trains.

I think his name was Mr Flight but my, sister thinks it was something else. My mother was a bit of a lady in those days, and always let people know how gracious she could be to people who were 'common'. As we watched by the signal box Mr Flight offered my mother a chair and a cup of tea. He could see I was a lady my, mother said later. And as she told people, she drank that tea, strong and black and laced with sugar like a Christian.

As everyone knew she took her tea weak and white - with no sugar.

It was about this time that I realised that my dad was more than someone who went to work and meetings and was Father. One day a plane flew dreadfully low and clipped the top of the silver birch tree that grew right outside the sitting room window which my father had refused to trim when they extended the aerodrome. As a child I thought the tree was huge. My sister agrees it was very tall, and old silver birch. I can't remember witnessing the incidence of plane clipping tree, but I can, remember the talk later. It was a beautiful tree, an elegant shape and a haven for birds, a cool oasis in summer and a picture in autumn. Maybe that was my father speaking.

Proper men, no doubt aviation engineers of the time, came to visit and with my father stood and looked at the tree, hands in pockets, heads thrown back. The tree remained outside the window, maybe with just a little off the top.

My sister tells me that it wasn't the silver birch that got clipped by a plane. It couldn’t be, she said, the house would have been hit - it was the yellow plum down the back. The Chinese plum I asked. No, she said. It was originally a seedling. It didn't have a name. The one with the big yellow juicy plums I asked. Yes she said, but they were so sour, I can still taste them. 

I could feel her face screw up over the phone. Like my mother's as she drank her tea, black and laced with sugar. But my brother says they were red skinned and yellow inside and tasted sweet but then it was all so long ago it is hard to remember.

short story - the story of Chicken Little

Chicken Little was found on the footpath. Outside the catholic church in Footscray. The identical tins Colleen and Bettina found him – just a small chirping ball of yellow fluff.

Eileen and Veronica were not maternal.They had each other. They shared a room in Footscray. They needed no one else to begin and end their day or their sentences. Not until Eileen had the tumour removed from her jaw and the surgeons took an opportunity to reshape her quarter moon profile. The non-identical identical twin. But that was later.

Eileen and Veronica placed the cheeping Chicken Little in the shopping bag and caught the bus to East Keilor. Out to the suburbs to present Chicken Little to Debbie. The woman. The wife. The mother.

When Debbie married Menur, Debbie's mother prayed in church that Debbie would keep the house nice and make Menur a good wife. When Debbie gave birth to Rosie, Debbie's mother prayed in church that Debbie would keep the house nice and be a good mother. When Debbie gave birth to Yusef, Debbie's mother cleaned the house, cooked for Menur and just prayed. When Debbie kicked Menur out Debbie's mother had him to stay.

Debbie found Wendy, a local day carer, for the children. She was not lucky with the animals. The dogs had to be put down. One kept running away and the other a biter. He had bitten Mrs Papadopolous next door and that was the end of him. The bird lasted three months and the goldfish died when the pond ran dry.

The cats, Celery and Daisy have survived. Mrs Papadopolous feeds them when Debbie is away or forgets to feed them.

Eileen and Veronica knew all this when they left the hapless chick in Debbie's care at East Keilor. The two red chickens which lived in the secret garden and laid eggs sometimes gave them confidence. There was a lovely rambling garden for a chicken in which to get lost. This was a good decision for a homeless chicken.

Rosie and Yusef loved Chicken Little for a while. They nursed him and made him a bed in a shoe box. The cats Celery and Daisy had to be separated from him as they nosed and poked and miaowed at him.

So for the first few days, then weeks and months, Chicken Little took over the house and became somewhat human. As he grew bolder he was banished to the side garden where he terrified the cats and flew at Mrs Papadopolous. In the secret garden he was attacked by the two red hens and came flying and squawking back over the hight fence and into the house.

Debbie tried to return him to Eileen and/or Veronica. But they had moved from their room in Footscray to the city or to Daylesford or both. One day they had returned to live with their surprised elderly parents.

After Menur left, Debbie's new boyfriend built a net to capture Chicken Little when he was most vicious. He was a wily bird and this little exercise could take all day. Simon would spend time doing the male bonding thing with Chicken Little. He had seen male bonding on a Mother and Son program. But Chicken Little was a ranting raving rooster.

One sunny day Chicken Little flew at Debbie once too often, pecking her legs and arms while she was painting in the side garden. She scruffed him by the neck and marched down the path through the mosaic garden. Past the red chairs and the ginger plant. Through the secret garden and over the stile at the back fence.

Across the grass and up to the thick buffer fence that separates East Keilor from the Calder Highway and the Maribyrnong River. With a mighty heave she threw Chicken Little over this fence.

The next morning Mrs Papadopolous brought the remains of Chicken Little to the fence to show Debbie. A fox, said Mrs Papadopolous, tearfully shaking her head. She thought Chicken Little had escaped through the shared back fence no one had bothered to mend.

We tried to tell Veronica but she lives at Daylesford now. She no longer has anyone to start or finish her sentences. She sells parsley and poems from a wheelbarrow in the streets of the town. Eileen gets lost in the city centre when she is released from care and is never quite sure if she is Eileen and/or Veronica

Debbie has an exhibition once a year in spite of the kids, the pets, the house and the boyfriend. She sends me a comic book called Bad Mother Volume III.

Yusef collects the feathers of Chicken Little and takes them to kindergarten for show and tell. Tells the story with a glint in his eye.

short story- a most remarkable young woman

artwork by Ruby Tuesday

In a small white cottage in Launceston Tasmania, a woman called Mary Henry conducted a nursing home for birthing mothers. Business was a little slack as the Second World War has taken most of the available sperm bank away to fight on the beaches and to be human fodder for the superior young blue bloods of the British army.

A small woman in her forties was expecting her-third child. She had some difficulty in facing reality - let alone the reality of childbirth pain. A new wonder drug called 'twilight zone' gave her several dreamy days of non-reality in which the pain was separate from her body. Mary Henry was particularly kind during this time. On the Thursday the small woman gave birth to a surprisingly healthy female child who was remarkably alert and vigorous. She was named after the kind woman 'who had brought her into the world'.

Within six months the child could fetch toys and other interesting objects from hidden places and defy order. It has been said that by this age she could flirt with any male within cooee and win their hearts. Her elderly parents employed a woman to take care of her and to manage the child's ferocious questioning and demands.

This child has some very early memories that are not supported by photographs or family memorabilia. The very first memories are of nightmares that crashed around the small head during sleep. She would stand, hanging onto her father's legs as he listened via short wave radio to the war reports. These reports were broadcast from England and would be very late at night. No one seemed to be aware of the lateness or impact on a small head filled with abstract thought.

The only visual stimulus to guide these thoughts were the Red Cross posters requesting support for war victims, one larger than life poster with two children clutching each other, one with crutches and a missing leg. The Government also pasted posters in public places inviting all able-bodied men to fight for the king and country.

Brave and blond is how she remembers them. Tall and tanned and proud in their new khaki uniforms. Proud to be Australian. They would lean out of the railway carriage as they left the local railway station, waving to mothers,wives and sweethearts who were crying. And the rest of the town would be singing wish me luck as you wave me goodbye without realising that the words needed meaning.

All through the nights the child would thrash against the dreams of German soldiers firing at her bed from a net hammock that stretched right across the bedroom ceiling.The bedroom was large, with high ceilings and a large box bay window with smaller lead-light windows at the top that stayed open all night. As the shotgun pellets hit the thin grey blankets small holes began to smoulder, threatening the child with fire. The night screaming continued for years. And fear of the dark, of sleep, of men, of the war, of being alone, stayed with the child for a long, long time.

From the high white bed, with horsehair mattresses to improve posture and prevent asthma attacks, she slipped her feet to the floor. Tiptoe, tiptoe, heart pounding, she would finally reach the bedroom door that led to the hallways in the large spreading house. The cold brass door knob sometimes defeated her and she would race back to bed, to shiver until the first stirrings of the house meant her father was awake.

Sometimes the fear was black inside her. She would wrench the door open and race across the miles of polished tiles, through the large wooden arch of the entrance hall to crash against the large warm comfortable bed of her parents. The voice had to be found as it often got lost in the fear inside her body and come out in short and silent gasps. She would ask in a whisper for a glass of water. On rare occasions her father would get out of his comfort and pour a glass of water from the squat yellow jug beside his bed, then take her back to her bed. When her voice could not be found she struggled back across the tiles to shiver in the cold white bed until the first grey light.

When the house began to stir she climbed down and followed her father as he set the fire in the range and then prepared the traditional pot of Scottish porridge for breakfast. She can remember the loud farts that hit the cold stillness and wondered at grown ups capacity to defy good manners. The mother had a habit of hiding behind good manners. Proper names for things were hidden in words like 'poofters' and 'what nots' and ‘pottygens’. These got the child into many difficulties. When she went to kindergarten she discovered that ‘whatnots’ were actually called 'your privates' and 'breaking wind' was something rude. Flying down the lane, flailing her arms against a stiff easterly sea breeze. Was that breaking wind? The child asked the woman who looked after her.

One childhood dream was calm and beautiful. Living under the sea with fluid movement and fluid colour. A dream that went on forever. The vision is quite clear to her more than fifty years later.

When she was just two she had an ongoing argument with the woman who cared for her about using the potty. In the days of lavatories down the garden, or at least down at the end of the back verandah, potties were not used just to toilet train children. Everyone but everyone had a chamber pot under the bed for nighttime relief. Ladies and gentlemen had beautiful china ones with delicate blooms painted across the curves. Children had white china ones and poor people used enamel ones or buckets. In the days before plastics. Squatting on these required the expertise of the acrobat, which is why some people had commodes. Chairs with a chamber pot under the seat. When Granny made the sign you slid her knickers round her knees, lifted the lid and sat her back down. The child had a cold white china pot under the cold white bed. The father sat the sleepy child on the pot and went sssssssss each night until he was satisfied. Dry beds by two was arbitrary. This was the way they did things in 1943.

After breakfast in 1943 children across Australia were sat on their potties while they listened to kindergarten of the air. This is what the argument was about. The lavatory at the large spreading house was down the garden path behind a rambling fuchsia and honeysuckle vine. It had a warm wooden seat and the timber walls were always freshly limed. The cat called Ginger rubbed his scents around the door hinges. Toilet paper during the war came in two varieties – huge loose rolls of white crinkled paper or small tight rolls of shiny brown paper.

In the kitchen the woman who cared for the child would turn on the wireless to kindergarten of the air, place the small china pot on the kitchen floor and the child would go rigid and scream. Finally the father intervened after a number of days and a small blue stool was made for the lavatory down the garden and the child could go when she pleased, even in the dark with her brother holding the candle. Less pleased was the woman in charge of the child.

A similar scene in another place. The child was three and very early one winter morning the family trailed up the empty dark streets of the town to the deserted railway station with suitcases balanced on the pram holding the latest baby. The train left the station at 6 30 am and reached the city where the aunt lived in the late afternoon. The large sunroom of the aunt's house filled with family and relatives and suitcases and crying children.

The aunt who loved children produced the bright enamel pot. The weary child was scruffed by the aunt and unceremoniously placed on the potty. Rigid with indignation and screaming in front of the family, relatives and the ancient grandmother.. And a brother who sniggered.

Other holidays followed with the aunt. And her dotty sister who lived down the yard in the converted garage. Dancing with the dotty aunt in the millions of pink petals falling from the huge flowering cherry tree. Playing my latest tune on the piano. A blue ceramic Vegemite jar that she scraped the Vegemite into for years because no one else I knew had a blue vegie jar. The smell of toast in an electric toaster at breakfast time. The small ancient grandmother in the side bedroom who smelt of cups of tea and talcum powder and the rattle of her cup in its saucer when she brought it out to the kitchen after breakfast.

On sunny days the father took the child for long walks down the' zigzag', a sandy track along the river. In the summer they hunted for ripe cranberries and blackberries which they ate and did not take home. When they extended the aerodrome during the war she lay on her back in the soft warm grass and copied her first letters onto paper, the letters that were printed large and black on the underwings of the landing planes. Letters that did not make words or sentences.

Measles spread all over her body the spring she was nearly four and after days of barley water and darkened rooms she was placed in a chair on the verandah in the weak sunshine for fresh air. Shock ran through her body when her legs failed to support her and she staggered and collapsed into darkness. And the woman who cared for her growling and putting her back in the darkened room to 'learn your lesson'.

The child was three. Was this was the first lesson?

The day the small Japanese plane flew across the sky fear threatened to burst the small bony chest of the child. When the child was four and a half the war ended. The war to end all wars. The end of the black out curtains. Underground shelters became favourite play houses or wine cellars.

The day the war ended all the bells rang and rang and rang. The bells in the Catholic Church at the top of the town competed with the bells in the Church of England tower at the bottom of the town. People lined the main street as the councillors handed out small silk English flags and brown paper bags of hard brown sweets. A bonfire was built up near the railway station and the hugeness and heat of the flames and the colours and noise of the fireworks burnt pictures in the child's small complicated head.

Peace meant a lot of things. It meant more sunshine and mothers who embroidered and arranged flowers and fathers who dashed off each evening to important peace meetings.It meant that the young men who returned alive from the war were barbaric. It meant their cat ran away because they were cruel to it. It was also afternoon teas with ladies, cucumber sandwiches, ration books and a new voile dress with a wide butterfly bow. A general easing of the worry.

The other children in the lane built a raft with stolen wood from the fish factory. The grown ups turned a blind eye. It was lashed together and drums were attached to make it float. The launching was quite exciting as they pushed it out into the broad bend of the creek by the hospital. The child was four and determined to be included. The overcrowded raft sank midstream midst laughter and the child panicked against the quick current. Struggling with fear to the muddy banks, finding her feet. Struggling back to the house to seek comfort.

The summer of 1946 the local newspaper conducted swimming lessons for children on the river. The children went down to the wharves and an old fisherman rowed them across to the bank where there was shallow water. The child had just recovered from chicken pox, scars still healing, but armed with a signed piece of paper turned up with the other children. The grown ups heaved and sighed but let her swim in the shallows. Come testing day the child tugged and teased the legs of the grown ups who were standing in the river with tapes between them to measure how far children could swim.

Finally one grown up let the child try and swim between the tapes. Twenty-five yards. The child dog paddled every inch and the distracted adults were disbelieving when the child panting and weak demanded recognition. On the day they handed out certificates the child got hers last, the youngest child in the campaign, the biggest pest.

The printed article about the child and the swimming campaign in the local newspaper became more important than the time before Christmas when she had her poem printed in the paper, a poem about the baby Jesus.The mother had sent it to the Editor. She was sent a book prize for the poem signed by an important lady. The prize was, called "Little Words from God', small moral verses" with a beautiful red cord through the binder.

This was the summer she started school, a bit early some of the father's friends thought. On the very first day she was excited and took her notebook that she wrote in, her sharpened pencils and a ruler and rubber that she got for Christmas. All in a little brown leather case.

The teacher had written all the letters of the alphabet on the blackboard, in perfect copperplate. 

When the children were told to write down the letters the child printed her story that went on and on and on until the teacher came to see what was happening. Seeing the rubber the teacher snatched up the ruler and said no rubbers allowed in class and to teach a lesson she hit the child on the hands with the ruler - smack, smack. 

The child's father had to be summoned from his work in the Council Chambers. The teacher picked her up and tried to comfort her but all the child could do was to sob more loudly and watch her green snot drip down the back of the teacher's black cardigan.

The father told the teacher that the child was remarkable. And he told the child that she was a most remarkable young woman. So the child went to work with the father on most days to keep her out of her mother’s hair, and later on that year and for many years afterwards went to the school when she felt like it.